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There currently is a combination of MS Windows desktop and server operating systems in use. However, Microsoft Corporation has been standardizing on MS Windows 10 and 11 versions. There are reports regarding a future release MS Windows 12. MS Windows XP support ended in 2014. MS Vista has been phased out. MS Windows 7 deployments had a substantial share of the desktop market, but are being phased out as part of a migration to Windows 10 and 11. There were three versions of MS Windows 8, 8.1, Pro, and RT; there no longer is a free upgrade to Windows 10. There is a hardware-driven requirement - upgrade path to Windows 11. MS Windows 10/11 and the MS Edge web browser are strategic components  to meet competition in desktop and mobile computing devices in global markets - AI: artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. Both the MS Windows operating system and MS SharePoint stack increasingly will have to accomodate the Apple - iOS, Google Android, and other third party OSS mobile computing device and cloud platforms. Microsoft has been developing the Windows operating system for MS Phone and Surface tablet integration with its desktop and SharePoint software stack infrastructure. There has been an increased interest and experimentation with Linux as a desktop operating system; however, this has not translated into significant desktop market share. The trend is towards mixed co-existance and integration with Android and Apple platform mobile device operating system platforms. The MS Windows 10/11 operating system also is the foundation to the integration of its MS Phone and tablet - Surface platform and its Azure cloud platform. The MS SharePoint Server stack platform is central to the Microsoft platform strategy - networking, scripting, and application development. By the fourth quarter 2023, the Microsoft Windows 11 operating system was in use on 400 million month active devices. Launched in October 2021, Windows 11 requires CPUs released from 2018 onwards and with devices that support TPM security chips. The minimum system requirements raised the security threshold and enabled memory integrity security features that rely on virtualization and Microsoft’s VMP: Virtual Machine Platform. Windows 11 was a free upgrade for Windows 10 users, but only if they met the minimum hardware requirements that left millions of machines behind. IT adoption is a significant slowdown from the Windows 10 usage upgrade and new hardware acquisitions.   Statcounter put Windows 11’s market share at approximately 25 percent, far behind the more than 70 percent of Windows 10. A Steam survey, Windows 11 had 37 percent of operating systems, compared to nearly 60 percent for Windows 10. Microsoft has never officially shared how many active devices are running Windows 11. In April 2022, Microsoft revealed that more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices were running Windows 10 or Windows 11. Microsoft Phone Link replaces the Your Phone Companion app and allows filtering notifications, receiving calls, and using mobile apps on a PC with the Microsoft Windows 10 or 11 operating system. This is available and can be implemented on Android and Apple iOS phones that meet the operating system release levels. Microsoft Corporation has announced that effective October 14, 2025, its Word, Excel, and PowerPoint software applications will no longer receive security updates on its Windows 10 operating system1. After that date, the applications will continue to function as before. However, Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 11 to avoid performance and reliability issues over time. The details of that statement will need to be tested and evaluated. According to Microsoft, when a user upgrades to Windows 11, all Microsoft 365 features and security updates will resume as before and that the Office update can be run to apply the latest version. Taken at face value, this means that Microsoft no longer will be supporting Windows operating system versions - 10, 8, 8.1, and 7. However, in the fourth quarter of 2024, Windows 11 had just 34.12% of the market share. Is this a realistic attainable strategy? Windows 10 had approximately 63% of the market. If Microsoft isn’t able to convince more businesses and consumers to switch to Windows 11 or a newer release of Windows by 2025, it probably will have to extend that support cutoff date. There are unconfirmed reports that Microsoft will be launching Windows 12. The assumption is that a future version of Windows will be focused on AI: artificial intelligence - ChatGPT and copilot. With infrastructure and back office operations, the assumption is that commodity hardware will be important in determining the distribution of server market share: proprietary MS Windows servers, open source Linux-variants, and commercial UNIX-driven processors.  A significant trend is the increased scale-out to Wintel server hardware from proprietary scale-up servers. In addition to their proprietary hardware and UNIX operating systems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard provide financing and technical support to the Linux foundation as part of increasing their utilization of Linux kernel. In response to this competition, Microsoft has become more accomodating to open source software - both utilization of Linux-variants with its Azure cloud platform and acquisition of GitHub.

Technology Updates
Apple - Mac  Operating System	Apple - iOS Operating System	Google Android Operating System	Google Chrome Operating System	MS Azure	MS SharePoint Server	MS Windows 10 - 11 Operating System
MS Azure Cloud Platform	MS Windows Server  2016, 2019, 2022	Red Hat and Fedora Linux	SUSE Linux	Ubuntu Linux	UNIX Administration	UNIX Programming

Sources:

Comments reported by Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing.

The Verge, Tom Warren, blog - October 2023 The information and data is consistent with that being presented by Wikipedia.

Additional information and Windows 11 facilities are in the process of being evaluated at the Microsoft Windows Store on Fifth Avenue in New York and at a SUNY ATTAIN computer lab.

Footnote 1:

This applies to the subscription version of Office, Microsoft 365, and non-subscription versions of Office 2021, Office 2019, and Office 2016.